[ecrea] Imagining 'We' in the Age of 'I' Study Day 29th March - CfP

This is a Call for Papers for the following *Study Day*:
*Imagining ‘We’ in the Age of ‘I’: Romance and Social Bonding in 
Contemporary Culture*
***University of Warwick, Friday 29**^th **March 2019*
Following an exciting symposium on 28^th September, the key aim of this 
forthcoming event will be to continue raising questions about 
conceptualising couples and related social groups today. It will achieve 
this through an emphasis on the evolving roles and forms of such social 
units in the cultural imaginary, taking stock of both novel means of 
engaging with tropes of romance, the family and adjacent forms of 
bonding and new ways of constructing these that respond to, mediate and 
feed back into shaping cultural trends in this domain.
In other words, we welcome culturally-oriented research, as well as 
sociological, psychological or more theoretical interventions.
*We especially welcome submissions from graduate students and early 
career researchers, for whom travel bursaries of **£**50-100 will be 
available to cover costs (possibly even for non-speaking delegates,*tbc 
depending on numbers – please keep an eye on the website for details 
when registration opens in January). The event itself is FREE (lunch and 
refreshments included).**
The Study Day asks questions such as:

  * What new means of depicting romance, broadly defined, have evolved
    of late in the multi-media age?
  * How do romantic fictions negotiate newly fluid ways of understanding
    gender, the role of technology in courting and work and other
    related, rapidly changing practices in coupling and related cultures?
  * How do such new instantiations inflect other trends in imagining the
    couple, for instance in relation to non-normative sexualities?
  * Related to this, how does fourth wave feminism – associated with
    online cultures and alliances with marginalised groups other than
    women – engage in dialogue with a genre, romantic fiction, often
    seen as feminine-accented?
  * How has #MeToo impacted on romantic courting rituals and
    inter-gender relations as a whole? In turn, how do new
    representations construct contemporary masculinity?
  * How might depictions and modes of imagining children, parenting,
    family structures, friendship and communities generally shift in
    response to the emphasis on cultivation of the self, and the erosion
    of private-public boundaries, potentially catalysed by both
    neo-liberalism and screen technologies?
  * Finally, how might these questions be nuanced differently in
    specific cultural contexts?
As well as stimulating debate, we hope the event will lead to a critical 
reappraisal of certain common assumptions about couples in particular 
and social bonding in general.
*Confirmed keynotes:*
Professor Diane Negra (UCD)
Professor Tamar Jeffers McDonald (University of Kent)
We are particularly open to proposals on:
-Narratives of romance and the family involving non-Western or 
non-Anglophone identities
-The influence of new technology on conceptualisations of the couple and 
the family, whether within texts or as channels for their dissemination
-Masculinity in contemporary romantic discourse
-Romance after #MeToo
-Papers considering the growing importance of friendship as romance may 
be co-opted by neoliberalism
However, any topic speaking to the themes of the event will be considered.
Please send proposals of no more than 250-words for a maximum 20-minute 
presentation and a short biog. to (imaginingromance /at/ warwick.ac.uk).
*Deadline for proposals: 12 December 2018*
This free event is part of a series funded by a British Academy Rising 
Star Engagement Award.
For more information see our website below or contact Dr. Mary Harrod 
(m.g.m.harrod /at/ warwick.ac.uk)
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/modernlanguages/news/events/imaginingromance/studyday/

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