(e)motion#
Cultural Literacy in Europe: Second Biennial Conference#
Warsaw 10-12 May 2017CALL FOR PAPERS#
This international conference aims to bring together new and innovative work in the field of literary and cultural studies. After the success of the 2015 conference, organised at Birkbeck College London, Cultural Literacy in Europe has developed into a thriving international organisation, with active membership and Special Interest Groups. For more information on the CLE initiative, visit http://cleurope.eu
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Cultural literacy is an ability to view the social and cultural phenomena that shape our lives – bodies of knowledge, fields of social action, individuals or groups, and of course cultural artefacts – as being essentially readable. Cultural literacy engages with interdisciplinarity, multilingualism and collaboration. It is a way of looking at social and cultural issues through the lens of literary thinking, employing communication, comparison and critique on a scale beyond that of one language or one nation-state, and avoiding abstraction. Furthermore, it is as much about innovation and creative practice – whether scholarly, artistic or social – as it is about analysis, and it very often brings these two methods together.
CLE 2017 is dedicated to the issue of motion, which is crucial for the contemporary human condition. The concept of motion captures the state of affairs in Europe today, where seemingly rock-solid arrangements, like the shapes of borders, are being nullified and apparently irreversible processes, like European integration, are turned around and dismantled. It marks our spatial relations, as is clearly visible in the challenges of migration, experiences of social and professional mobility, social movements or tourism. Mobility also has a temporal aspect, which is visible in the processual and performative character of identity, memory or history. The other key term we would like to address is emotion, which aims to contextualize this movement and localize it in human affectivity – feelings, motives and perceptions. Texts and other kinds of representations, the body in movement, forging personal links, living with memories – all these bring motion and emotion together. We believe that the notion of cultural literacy will help us read and comprehend these diverse, changeable phenomena.
In your proposal, you may wish refer to one or more of the following areas:
- How are ways of remembering and forgetting linked to mobility? Is cultural memory changing in the light of new forms of mobility?
- How does affect theory help us understand contemporary migration and its cultural representations?
- Migration and translation – how do either or both of these activities divide or unite national and linguistic groups?
- How are creative representations refreshed in a newly mobile world? What limits or empowers the representation of mobile lives?
- Is the contemporary body changing beyond recognition, into new forms of enhanced mobility – or depleted reality?
- How do mobile, ever-changing and fluid digital texts of news feeds, blogs, social media sites or artistic creations reshape our engagement with culture and identity-building processes?
- Do theoretical notions rooted in the experience of movement (e.g. travelling concepts, hospitality, centre and periphery) help us understand non-theoretical issues?
Submission Types
1. Individual academic papers. These must be 20 minutes long and will be grouped into parallel sessions: 3 papers followed by questions.
2. Poster presentations. These are presentations of projects which are successful examples of Literary-and-Cultural Studies research, relevant to the conference topic. They will be presented in a plenary panel as lightning talks (3 minutes per project), followed by a poster session.
Submission Procedure
Proposals must be submitted by 15 October on-line (check: http://cleurope.eu/CLE2017 for details)
Your abstract must include a title & must not exceed 500 words (including bibliography if relevant). Please also supply a short bio (100 words).
Fees and bursaries
Detailed information about fees will be available at a later date on the conference website. A number of Early-Career Bursaries will be available for participants presenting a paper or a poster. Applicants will have to provide a statement of up to 500 words, explaining their interest in the Cultural Literacy in Europe project and their particular need for the bursary.
Organizers
Cultural Literacy in Europe Forum
Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences
Committee on Literary Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences
Program Committee: Madeleine Campbell, Robert Crawshaw, Mary Gallagher, Daniela Koleva, Maciej Maryl, Naomi Segal
Local Organizers: Anna Barcz, Dorota Jarecka, Nina Kancewicz-Hoffman, Paweł Mościcki, Justyna Tabaszewska, Marek Zaleski
Venue: Staszic Palace, Nowy Swiat 70, Warsaw
Full information is available on the conference website: http://cleurope.eu/CLE2017
All queries should be addressed to: CLE2017@ibl.waw.pl
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