A graduate student conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

March 11th – 13th, 2011

CALL FOR PAPERS

Urban spaces both produce and are produced by gender. The Graduate Consortium in Women’s Studies conference, Gender, Sexuality and Urban Spaces, seeks to explore the reciprocity of these complex relationships. We are interested in how life (or living) in urban spaces mark as well as produce gendered and sexed bodies and how gender, class and race relations, performances and sexualities, in turn, make their marks on the urban spaces. By urban spaces, we mean the lived practices and representations through which a variety of spaces are constituted within and beyond the scope of the city. We invite submissions that examine the construction of gender and sexuality (in conjunction with race, class, & mobility) and urban spaces across a range of historical, cultural, national, fictional, and conceptual contexts.
From census surveys, subway maps, and zoning laws to post-apocalyptic narratives, the construction of sexualities, gender relations, performances, and gendered bodies in urban spaces has been robustly imagined, documented, and regulated. Keeping in mind the rich interdisciplinarity suggested by these approaches, this conference seeks to address the following questions:

How have evolving conceptions of gender and sexuality altered the city in the past, present, and future?
How has the city altered conceptions of gender / sexuality?
How have understandings of gender / sexuality shaped the material and social / cultural spaces of the city?
How do gender / sexuality impact access to urban spaces and why?
How are conceptions of gender and sexuality reinforced, challenged, or subverted through gendered / sexed bodies and the urban spaces they inhabit?

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

Spatial Dynamics of the City
Built and Natural Urban Environments
Public and Private Spaces
Access: to Institutions, to Policy, to Geographies, etc.
Feminist Practices in the city
Migration, Immigration, and the City
Transportation and Mobility
Urban Aesthetics
Queer Spaces
Gender and Technologies
Institutions and Gender
Urban Activism
Tourism and Gender
Intersectionality and the City
Visual and Textual Representations

Please submit 250-word abstracts for 15-minute individual presentations or a proposal for a complete panel of three papers with a 100-word panel abstract and paper abstracts of 150 words each. E-mail submissions to gcws@mit.edu by December 2nd, 2010. All submissions should include 3-5 sentence biographical statements for all paper presenters, which include current research interests and institutional affiliation(s). Please note all AV needs you will have in an additional paragraph.

Accepted participants will be notified via e-mail by January 7th, 2011.

And, another from Columbia:

Humble Body, Humble Mind: Selflessness, Lowliness, and the Religious

The Group for the Study of Early Cultures at the University of California, Irvine invites submissions for its Third Annual Graduate Student Conference:

INTERIORITY IN EARLY CULTURES
Friday & Saturday, January 21-22, 2011
Keynote Address by Paul Strohm (Anna Garbedian Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University)

Our contemporary understanding of interiority is tied to a sense of domestic life, personal psychology, and the separation of public and private spheres, all which suggest a model of human existence and interaction that hinges on the delineation of what is ‘inside.’ This conference revitalizes notions of the interior in premodern contexts, ranging from the ancient era, through the medieval and early modern periods, and into the eighteenth century. We define “interiority” loosely as any terrain, such as conscience, mind, psyche, soul, or spirit, that positions itself within a subject. Given this openness, we invite papers across a variety of disciplines that investigate interiority in any of its manifestations­ literary, historical, visual, dramatic, legal, spiritual, or philosophical ­in early cultures. Fundamentally, we seek to question and mobilize the borders between the interior and exterior as vital spaces of containment and definition.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Religious Interiors:  How do the concepts of the sacred and profane hinge on an inner life? Can spiritual interiors conflict with one another? Do dream visions and experiences of the sublime effectively challenge the delineation of the interior?

Interior Bodies: Are interior spaces altered in concert with new discourses of the body, disease, anatomy, and medical knowledge? Do seemingly ‘exterior’ changes in consumption practices (food, goods, clothing) rework internal awareness? How is queerness performed or experienced within premodern interiority?

Political Interiors: Through what means do royal, national, and local subjects construct interiorities? Does state power depend on constructing interiority in its subjects? How do indigenous and colonial tensions engage with sovereign interiority?

Textual Interiors: Do literary works contain interiorities through the incorporation of authorial voice, as in memoirs or confessions? Are new interiorities modified through translation?

Metaphorical Interiors: In what ways do material containers, such as chambers, closets, or caskets, stand in for psychic interiors? How do performed scenes gesture to, or create, a sense of interiority in their spatial configuration?

All interested graduate students, from any university and discipline, are welcome to submit a one-page abstract on any topic related to the self. For more information please visit the conference website at the Group for the Study of Early Cultures at http://www.humanities.uci.edu/earlycultures/

Deadline for abstracts: September 15, 2010

Please limit the length of abstracts to no more than 300 words.  Send abstracts and CVs to earlycultures2010@gmail.com.

The Group for the Study of Early Cultures focuses mainly on fields that investigate pre-modern societies, including but not limited to: Classics, Late Antiquity, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, 18^th Century Studies, East Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, and Islamic Studies.  We are also interested in a wide range of disciplinary approaches to Early Cultures, including literary studies, history, art history, drama, visual studies, sociology, culture studies, anthropology, political science, philosophy, and religious studies. For more information about our organization, please visit our website: http://www.humanities.uci.edu/earlycultures/