Humour

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Inter-Disciplinary.Net

Humour
Call for Participation 2016

Saturday 2nd July – Monday 4th July 2016
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

This inclusive interdisciplinary event is aimed to explore the mechanisms of humour, its elements of surprise and contradiction that appeal to human nature, circulating sameness and otherness altogether: through the agency of positive disposition, the inside(r) finds external expression, just the same as the outside(r) is incorporated within.

Among the typical human universals, humour is a stratagem of establishing relationships and achieving integration, a method to enter discourse and dialogue. Numerous questions of identity are dealt with humour and its almost instant consequence, laughter, as both codify a mode of self-expression and facilitate human interaction, providing an emotional context for communication and communion. Socially and politically, humour is a strategy employed to approach serious topics, a weapon authorising the exploitation and explosion of exclusive structures. Pointing to the inappropriate codifications of human behaviour, it is intended to undermine prevailing patterns, to expose and challenge stereotypes, to mock clichés.

Mixture of sublime and ridiculous, humour is an entirely subjective experience, decided by personal taste, education and culture, geographical and historical context. Incompatible images, unsuitable circumstances, behavioural inconsistency and last but not least the mastery of language generate a variety of types (verbal/visual/physical, intentional/unintentional, implicit/explicit, real/surreal, etc.) and forms (badinage, banter, clowning, derision, cynicism, farce, flippancy, irony, mockery, parody, raillery, ridicule, sarcasm, sardonicism, satire, scorn, etc.).

Often ambiguous and difficult to decode, humour is a unique human feature based on wit, cleverness and intelligence, and requires a certain inner structure capable of dealing with the situational incongruities that occur between appearance and essence.

Submissions and contributions to the discussion of humour and its various forms of manifestation are invited. They may include but are not limited to several core issues:

• From theory of humours to theories of humour
• The archaeology of humour and laughter: from ancient times to the new Millennium
• Perceptions of humour: essentialism vs existentialism
• Humour as a strategy of survival
• The places and spaces of humour
• The restorative function and therapeutic values of laughter
• The language of humour
• Laughter – the universal panacea
• Smiles, grins, smirks and smugs
• Clowns and comics, pranksters and jesters
• Genderised versions of humour
• Humour in popular culture: cinema, television and radio
• Humour – levels of acceptance in science, business, politics, religion, architecture, gastronomy, etc.
• Borders of humour: dark humour, horror humour, crude humour, toilet humour, off-colour humour
• The English sense of humour: understatement, euphemism, self-effacement
• Globalisation of humour: traceability and translatability
• The future of humour

Please visit the conference website for further details and information:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/probing-the-boundaries/persons/humour/...

Call for Cross-Over Presentations
The Humour project will be meeting at the same time as a project on Love Letters. We welcome submissions which cross the divide between both project areas. If you would like to be considered for a cross project session, please mark your submission "Crossover Submission".

What to Send
300 word abstracts, proposals and other forms of contribution should be submitted by Friday 29th January 2016.
All submissions be minimally double reviewed, under anonymous (blind) conditions, by a global panel drawn from members of the Project Team and the Advisory Board. In practice our procedures usually entail that by the time a proposal is accepted, it will have been triple and quadruple reviewed.

You will be notified of the panel's decision by Friday 12th February 2016.
If your submission is accepted for the conference, a full draft of your contribution should be submitted by Friday 3rd June 2016.

Abstracts may be in Word, RTF or Notepad formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in programme, c) email address, d) title of proposal, e) body of proposal, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: Humour Abstract Submission

Where to Send
Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to the Organising Chairs with listed emails:

Organising Chairs:
Elena Nistor: elena_nistor@yahoo.com
Rob Fisher: humour@inter-disciplinary.net

This event is an inclusive interdisciplinary research and publishing project. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting.

All papers accepted for and presented at the conference must be in English and will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume(s). All publications from the conference will require editors, to be chosen from interested delegates from the conference.

Ethos
Inter-Disciplinary.Net believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make this commitment, please do not submit an abstract for presentation. Please note: Inter-Disciplinary.Net is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence.