Autor: GKS

“Open Covenants: Pasts and Futures of Global America”

Stockholm, September 28–30, 2018

EXTENDED DEADLINE: MARCH 1, 2018*

The Swedish Association for American Studies (SAAS) will hold its 10^th biennial conference in Stockholm on September 28–30, 2018. Confirmed keynote speakers are David R. Roediger (University of Kansas), Sylvia Mayer (University of Bayreuth), and Frida Stranne (Halmstad University).

We hereby invite proposals on any subject in the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. The overarching theme for the conference is “Open Covenants: Pasts and Futures of Global America,” which highlights central tensions in American culture and politics: the relation between isolationism and internationalism, openness and closure, migration and borders, exceptionalism and universalism. We particularly welcome submissions engaging with this broader theme.

See full CfP and further information here.

Deadline for Proposals: March 1, 2018.

October 18-21, 2018, Crowne Plaza | Fredericton, New Brunswick

Canadians spend their formative years in institutions of education. Moreover, they are now expected to be part of a culture of lifelong learning. They are shaped by and in turn shape formal educational structures and informal networks, from scouts to amateur sports, YMCAs to literacy programs. While framed as individual development, educational programming is also centrally about communities and community-building. This is not always an easy relationship, as tensions over community values demonstrate. As a result, education is a site of contention, be it over religious and ethnic differences, language rights, or social and cultural expectations. Presentations at this conference will examine education’s relationship to notions of community and its role in community-building. They will also explore how new educational developments such as insights from neuroscience, the emphasis on social and emotional learning, the consequences of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or the impact of inclusive education, are reshaping ideals and understandings of community and the enterprise of educational history itself.

See full CfP here.

Deadline for Proposals: March 1, 2018.

Editors: Svetlana Seibel and Kati Dlaske

Indigenous Popular Culture is currently one of the fastest-growing fields of contemporary cultural production in the United States and Canada, but also other regions across the globe. Indigenous artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs of all walks of life proliferate increasingly on the contemporary popular cultural landscape in all its various incarnations, from popular fiction to animation to the fashion world. Diverse Indigenous practitioners of the popular throughout the world not only intervene powerfully into the landscape of popular culture and representation—a cultural field which is notorious for its various appropriations and misrepresentations of Indigenous people and cultures—but also draw attention to the pressing social and political challenges which Indigenous communities are facing today. With its ever expanding scope, Indigenous popular culture harnesses the vibrant and mutable energies of popular culture, fan culture, and geek culture in order to not only indigenize the cultural field of the popular, but also to advance Indigenous cultural archives in a multiplicity of forms. Thus, Indigenous popular culture is not only a field of a dynamic creative expression, but often also in one way or another stands in dialogue with contemporary Indigenous activist groups and causes working towards the goal of decolonization and Indigenous resurgence.

The proposed volume seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners of Indigenous popular culture in order to illustrate the cultural vibrancy, complexity, and importance of this emerging field. We therefore invite contributions from academics as well as artists, entrepreneurs, event organizers, cos players etc. Contributions may focus on any aspect of Indigenous popular culture in any of the geographic areas throughout the globe.

See the full CfP here.

Deadline for Proposals: March 1, 2018.

University of Manitoba – University of Trier – University of Greifswald, Biennial Partnership Conference, September 20-21, 2018, University of Manitoba, Canada

We live in one of the great ages of memory, a time in which forces have converged to push memory to the forefront of our moral, political, scientific, and aesthetic lives. Some have even referred to the current moment as being characterized by a “memory boom.” The standard view of this boom is that it has come about owing to a variety of factors, including, a decline in confidence in “modernist” narratives of progress over the course of the twentieth century, the rise of consumer culture, which has turned nostalgia into a commodity, and multiculturalism and individualism, which have in related ways fragmented our collective sense of self, forcing nation-states to turn to the real or imagined past to buttress their legitimacy. Memory has been further bolstered by the Holocaust and other such horrors, which have called into question the integrity of our moral imaginations and ushered in what has been called “a culture of trauma and regret.” We find this culture at work in public institutions such as memorials and museums, as well as in the proliferation of media representations of the personal past. It is also evident in such socially and politically transformative agencies and processes as truth commissions and public inquiries.

Proposals are invited for an interdisciplinary conference on the subject of memory. The conference, to be held at the University of Manitoba, is in partnership with the Trier University. The scope of the conference is broad, and the theme is intended to encompass scholarship on all forms of memory (personal, collective, institutional, cognitive, etc.). Of particular interest is work pertaining to memory as it is understood, and circulates (is celebrated, contested, etc.), in Canadian and German academic and cultural contexts. Presentations are welcome to address works and issues from different fields, media, and conceptual perspectives.

See the full CfP here.

Deadline for Proposals: April 30, 2018.

Sunday, 28 October 2018, Ottawa, Canada

Organized by the Department of English at Ryerson University, the Vered Jewish Canadian Studies Program at the University of Ottawa, the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies, and Library and Archives Canada

Although the Holocaust has long engaged writers in Canada – those with and without direct links to the historic event – their particular exploration of the subject has received little critical or scholarly attention. There now exists a significant body of Canadian Holocaust Literature that warrants such attention. We invite proposals for the first-ever conference devoted to Canadian Holocaust Literature. The aim of this landmark conference is twofold: to identify a corpus of work and to generate scholarly interest in the field. Proposals that focus on literary works originally written in Yiddish, Hebrew, English, or French are welcome. For the purposes of this conference, literary works include poetry, short fiction, novels, life writing, graphic narrative, and creative non-fiction. The theme of this inaugural conference is deliberately broad, and critical approaches may vary widely.

See the full CfP here.

Deadline for Proposals: June 15, 2018.