[ecrea] CFP: Promises of Monsters

**Call for papers***

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***Promises of Monsters***

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***28-29^th of April 2016**
University of Stavanger, Norway***

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***Confirmed keynote speakers:***

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***Professor Margrit Shildrick (Linköping University, Sweden)**
Assistant Professor Surekha Davies (Western Connecticut State
University, US)**__*

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Monsters are back, or perhaps they never went away. They haunt popular
culture and social media. They lurk as images of dread and terror in
politics, and figures of thought within academia. As shadows of the past
they reappear as thepotential biotechnological realities of today. They
roam the in-between, makingborders and boundaries tremble and shatter;
whether these be borders of nation states or bodies, or categories of
race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, self and other. In this sense,
the monster seems to embody a promise of disturbances and change, as
Donna Haraway argued in her 1992 text “The Promises of Monsters”.

Haraway’s text heralds the 1990s rapid increase in academic engagement
with figures of ghosts and monsters, the spectral and the monstrous,
encompassing publications such as Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1994) and
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s anthology Monster Theory (1996). Now, on the
other side of the millennium-threshold, the popularity of monsters has
flared up again, inspiring publications such as for example Ashgate’s
Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous (Mittman and Dendle
2012). 20 years after Haraway’s essay, “The Promise of Monsters” (2012)
is evoked yet again, this time by Cohen, to point to the strange
temporalities and disturbing messages of the figure of the monster as it
haunts the margins of reality and human subjecthood. Messages that may
well be promises, but of what?

The interdisciplinary conference Promises of Monsters invites
contributors to think critically with and through the figure of the
monster. What does the monster promise? What contradictions,
uncertainties, anxieties, desires and disturbances haunt the shifting
landscapes of monsters? How might the monster help unsettle and rethink
traditional ontology, epistemology and ethics? In other words: how might
the monster help one think and imagine the world differently? Indeed,
what does the monster index in a rapidly developing technological globe
where inequalities are ever-more apparent and expanding? How do monsters
come to represent the very racialised, sexualised, able-ist, gendered
and homophobic injustices of historical and contemporary modes of
belonging and migrating? And how do monsters haunt disciplines
differently and why?

Promises of Monsters invites all, including researchers, artists and
practitioners, to engage on an interdisciplinary level with the subject
of monsters and the monstrous. As well as traditional academic style
presentations, we also welcome creative submissions across all genres
and forms.

The following are possible themes for panels, papers and artistic
contributions, but we welcome you to think beyond these suggestions:

Animal studies

Art, popular culture

Critical race theory

Digital technologies and social media

Disability studies

Ecocriticism

Ethics

Gender and feminist theory

Hauntology/spectrality

(Im-)materiality, embodiment

Medical humanities

Postcolonial studies

Posthumanism

Queer and sexuality studies

Science fiction, horror, and fantasy

Technology, medicine

Temporality/history

Xenophobia, the Other

We accept submissions for papers and panels. Please get in touch about
artistic submissions.

Send your abstract (250 - 300 words and a 50 word bio) and/or questions
to: promisesofmonsters [at] gmail [dot] com

For updates, see our website: https://promisesofmonsters.wordpress.com/

Deadline for submissions: 15^th December 2015

Promises of Monsters is organized by The Monster Network. You can find
and join us on Facebook.




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