CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Conference: "Health, Embodiment, and Visual Culture: Engaging
Publics and Pedagogies"
November 19-20, 2010
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Conference Co-Chairs:
Sarah Brophy, Associate Professor, Department of English and
Cultural Studies, McMaster University
Janice Hladki, Associate Professor, School of the Arts, McMaster University
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: January 15, 2010
CONFERENCE DESCRIPTION:
This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore how visual
cultural practices image and imagine unruly bodies and, in so doing,
respond to Patricia Zimmermann's call for "radical media democracies
that animate contentious public spheres" (2000, p. xx). Our aim is
to explore how health, disability, and the body are theorized,
materialized, and politicized in forms of visual culture including
photography, video art, graphic memoir, film, body art and
performance, and digital media. Accordingly, we invite proposals for
individual papers and roundtables that consider how contemporary
visual culture makes bodies political in ways that matter for the
future of democracy. Proposals may draw on fields such as: visual
culture, critical theory, disability studies, health studies,
science studies, autobiography studies, indigenous studies,
feminisms, queer studies, and globalization/transnationalism.
CONFERENCE EVENTS:
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
*Rebecca Belmore,* internationally recognized Anishinabekwe artist,
Vancouver (exhibitions of her performance, video, installation, and
sculpture include: Venice Biennale, Sydney Biennale, Brooklyn Museum
of Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts);
*Lisa Cartwright,* Professor of Communication and Science Studies
and Affiliated Faculty in Gender Studies, Department of
Communication, University of California, San Diego (/Screening the
Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture/; /Moral Spectatorship:
Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child/)
*Robert McRuer,* Professor and Deputy Chair, Department of English,
George Washington University, Washington, DC (/Crip Theory: Cultural
Signs of Queerness and Disability/; /The Queer Renaissance:
Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and
Gay Identities/);
*Ato Quayson,* Professor of English and Director of the Centre for
Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto
(/Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of
Representation/; /Relocating Postcolonialism/).
The conference will also feature /Scrapes: Unruly Embodiments in
Video Art,/ an exhibition curated by Sarah Brophy and Janice Hladki,
at the McMaster Museum of Art.
POSSIBLE THEMATICS:
1. Technologies
-- medical technologies (e.g. medical imaging, drug therapies,
prosthetics and other devices) and their implications for
embodiment, subjectivity, community, kinship, and politics
-- corporeality and the senses as sites/forms of knowledge-making
-- biopolitics and surveillance
-- the relationship between "old" and "new" technologies
-- how technologies mediate social spaces of embodiment and interaction
-- interrogations of the human and posthuman in medicine, science, and art
2. Cultural Production
-- cultural pedagogy; the production of knowledge in sites of
cultural production (e.g. galleries, festivals, classrooms, online, etc.)
-- counter-publics (e.g. disability culture)
-- indigenous modes of cultural production
-- diasporic/transnational issues and practices
-- new representational modes (e.g. digital arts, graphic memoir)
-- documentary practices
-- "doing politics in art" (Bennett)
3. Disability
-- medical, scientific, and cultural discourses of disability
-- performing and witnessing embodied difference
-- interrogations of impairment
-- genetics, reproduction, eugenics
-- dis-ease and disorder
-- "ability trouble" (McRuer)
-- "radical crip images" (McRuer)
4. Affect
-- explorations of "ugly feelings" (Ngai), "aesthetic nervousness"
(Quayson), "moral spectatorship" (Cartwright), "empathic vision"
(Bennett), and "seeing for" (Bal)
-- relationships to medicalization, regulation, and surveillance
-- affect as generative/productive in relation to concepts of
ethical spectatorship and witnessing
-- relationships between corporeality and theorizations of nature as
dynamic and agentic (Barad, Grosz, Haraway)
-- can we/should we move beyond the theories that posit /negative/
affect as a prime site for ethics?
-- affect and global politics: representations of global mobilities,
violence, war, terrorism
HOW TO SUBMIT A PROPOSAL:
We kindly invite submissions from scholars, artists, health
professionals, community members, and activists in all areas and disciplines.
Concurrent sessions will be 90 minutes in length. Proposals for the
following formats will be considered:
1) Individual papers: 15 minutes in length
2) Roundtables: 4-5 participants, including a designated moderator
and a plan for facilitated discussion of ideas
All submissions will be peer-reviewed.
Individual paper submissions should include:
1) affiliation and contact information
2) a biographical note of up to 200 words
3) paper title and a 300-500 word abstract; the description of the
paper's content should be as specific as possible and indicate
relevance to one or more of the conference thematics.
4) details of audiovisual needs (e.g. DVD, LCD projection, and/or
VHS). Note that participants will need to bring their own laptops.
Roundtable submissions should include:
1) affiliation and contact information for each participant
2) a biographical note of up to 200 words for each participant
3) roundtable title and a 500 word proposal. The proposal should
both indicate the relevance of the roundtable to one or more of the
conference thematics and outline the organization of the proposed discussion.
4) details of audiovisual needs (e.g. DVD, LCD projection, and/or
VHS). Note that participants will need to bring their own laptops.
All submissions should be sent via email attachment to
(viscult /at/ mcmaster.ca) <mailto:(viscult /at/ mcmaster.ca)> by January 15,
2010. Please use the subject line "proposal for Health, Embodiment,
and Visual Culture." Attachments should be in .doc or .rtf formats.
If electronic submission is not possible, please mail or fax
proposals to arrive by January 15, 2010.
Address: Sarah Brophy & Janice Hladki: Health, Embodiment, and
Visual Culture Conference
c/o Department of English & Cultural Studies
Chester New Hall 321
McMaster University
1280 Main Street West
Hamilton, Ontario, L8S 4L9
Fax: 905-777-8316
ACCESSIBILITY:
Presenters are encouraged to explore ways to make physical, sensory,
and intellectual access a fundamental part of their presentation.
Suggestions include: large print (18 point font) copies of handouts,
large-print copies of paper or panel outlines, and/or audio
descriptions of any film or video clips and images. Presenters are
also encouraged to consider open or closed captioning of films and video clips.
POST-CONFERENCE PUBLICATION PLANS:
Papers from the conference will be considered for a special issue of
/The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies/.
CONFERENCE SPONSORSHIP:
Sponsored by the Department of English and Cultural Studies at
McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario (John Taylor Douglas Fund).
--
Sarah Brophy
Associate Professor
Department of English and Cultural Studies
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
L8S 4L9
(brophys /at/ mcmaster.ca)
