What: Southwest Humanities Symposium Annual Conference

Where: Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ and online (hybrid conference)

When: Saturday 25 March 2023

Submission form: https://forms.gle/MX7RuYjD7cWTjSSU8

“With the collapse of various dyads – nature/culture, body/mind, conscious/unconscious, intentional/unintentional, expression/feeling – the binary of cause/effect also dissolves into dynamic biocultural processes in which humans take part. Experience is shaped relationally. “

Rob Bodicce and Mark Smith, Emotion, Sense, Experience (47)

The Graduate Scholars of English Association at Arizona State University welcomes the broader community of humanities graduate students to join us in exploring how the ways in which we perceive and encounter the self and the non-self—the relationship(s) between Merleau-Ponty’s “Self – Other – Things”—shape our mutual and entangled realities. Our approach is fundamentally interdisciplinary, affirming an expansive and generative humanities. We invite scholarship, creative writing, and art that grapples with entanglement and the complex affordances (and challenges) it presents. We encourage our participants to reject the comfort of binaries and dig into the muck between spaces. 

Questions of relational experience might engage (but are not limited to) the following:

·      Linguistic and literary networks

·      Emotion and affect studies

·      Ecologies, environmental humanities, and the biocultural

·      Disability studies

·      Sensory perceptions/communities

·      The anthropocene and the post-human

We welcome proposals for individual papers, panels, creative projects, and digital exhibits from disciplines across the humanities that approach the conference theme via diverse forms and techniques. 

Proposals for papers, creative projects, and digital exhibits should be no more than 250 words; panel proposals (3-4 speakers) should be no more than 750 words, describing the theme of the panel and each paper.

The 2023 Southwest Humanities Symposium will take place in a hybrid format on Arizona State University’s campus and Zoom on March 25th, 2023.

Abstract deadline: Jan 31, 2023

Notice of acceptance: Feb 15, 2023