Call for Papers:
Commonalities: Imagining the Ordinary

2011 Rice University Symposium, sponsored by the English Department
Rice University in Houston, Texas

September 23rd – 24th, 2011

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Julia Reinhard Lupton
Submission deadline: July 1st, 2011.
The annual Rice University Symposium invites papers that examine the unexpected material and affective supports of the common, commons, and community. Papers might explore representations of communities as they develop across spatial and temporal boundaries as well as how shared background understandings connect to the experience of the ordinary. We are especially interested in how these issues relate to the question of the commons and the role collective life plays in various social imaginaries. Submissions that range across periods, theoretical orientations, and disciplines are welcome.
Possible paper topics:

· Communal pursuit of happiness
· Intimate publics
· Material culture and design
· Production of collective agency and organizing
· Religious communities
· Spatial and architectural constructions of communities
· Communitarianism
· Queer publics
· Communities created through popular art forms
· Negotiations of (post)colonial and political power in peripheral communities
· Communal expectations of gender roles
· Construction of shared and private property
· Regionalisms, nationalisms, internationalisms
· Globalized, transnational, and hemispheric communities
· In/visibility in building and managing common spaces
· Life worlds
· Economic, political, and digital commons
· Legal and juridical dimensions of the commons

We are now accepting abstracts of 250 words or less to rice.symposium@gmail.com.

*Dr. Julia Reinhard Lupton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, with a joint appointment in Education. Her most recent scholarly books include Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Her newest project, Shakespeare and Hospitality: Actions, Objects and Environments in Renaissance Drama and Contemporary Life, draws on design theory, phenomenology, and political theology to explore the life of objects in housekeeping and hospitality. Her research interests include Shakespeare, Renaissance Literature, Religious Studies, Humanities and the Public Sphere, and design and everyday life.