Call For Papers

Conference website

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most seminal events in modern American poetry, the Vancouver Poetry Conference 1963. Following the publication of Donald Allen’s prescient The New American Poetry in 1960, Warren Tallman and Robert Creeley gathered together a number of the New American poets (including Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, and Allen Ginsberg) in Vancouver for three weeks of poetry readings, public lectures, workshops and roundtable discussions on contemporary experimental poetics. This occasion helped to consolidate some of the primary theoretical arguments informing American experimental poetry of the period and facilitated an unprecedented level of cross-fertilisation and dialogic exchange between current and successive generations of experimental poets.

To coincide with UEA’s own fiftieth anniversary, the School of American Studies will be hosting a one day conference to reassesses the continuing legacies of the Vancouver Poetry Conference and its participants. We welcome proposals on topics related, but not limited, to:

•  The poetry/poetics of the contributors to the conference; Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Philip Whalen, Margaret Avison, etc.
• A cross-border (Am-Can) avant-garde: for example, the influence of the conference in establishing a relationship between experimental poets associated with Robin Blaser in British Columbia and those associated with Robert Duncan in San Francisco.
• The transgression of borders in experimental American poetry (formal, stylistic, thematic, etc and/or political, philosophical, sexual, religious, etc)
• The importance of the border (spatial, conceptual, literal, ethical, textual, etc) in experimental American poetry
• Instances of direct inter-generational influence and/or dialogue between the contributors and successive experimental poets/poetry collectives

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to davidmccarthy.uea@gmail.com by 31^st August 2013. The conference poster can be found Here.

University of Manchester’s School of Arts, Languages and Cultures Graduate School Inaugural Conference for Academic Year 2013-2014

Writing Beyond Borders

The University of Manchester, 20^th September 2013

Opening Keynote Speaker: Dr Jean-Marc Dreyfus (Religion and Theology, Manchester)

Closing Keynote Speaker: Dr Claire Chambers (English Literature, York)

This conference aims to examine the ways in which reading, writing and researching literature intersects with conceptions of borders and border crossing. The conference arises from and seeks to expand debates in postcolonial studies and criticism surrounding boundaries (whether cultural, linguistic, historical, personal, economic, etc). As such, we welcome contributions from literary studies and complementary fields. Through this interdisciplinary approach, we aim to understand the varying methods used to answer questions such as:

• Does a border inherently imply a binary, and on what terms?
• It is possible to remove a border without removing one ‘side’, or to have two sides without a border?
• Can individuals choose (how) to position themselves in relation to borders, or is a side inherently imposed? Can we inhabit borders?
• Is a postcolonial world moving towards a borderless world, and if so, what would this look like or mean?
• Are borderlines inevitable in a capitalist society?
• How do human borderlines manifest themselves in the formal space of a text or book? How does this impact on our work as researchers?
• What does it mean to write in a language other than your ‘mother tongue’? Does the concept of ‘mother tongue’ itself create or reinforce socio-historic borders?
• Do changing borders demand changing methods?
• Is there a possibility of border-transcending or borderless literature, or are such borderlines as language, gender, religion and nationality essential to literature?
• What are the implications of a future borderless space?

We invite responses to these and related questions in the form of a maximum 300-word abstract for a 15-minute paper. Please email abstracts to writingbeyondborders@gmail.com by 5^th July, 2013.

Please also include a title for the proposed presentation and details of your PhD topic, discipline and University.

Call for Proposals, Food Across Borders

CALL FOR PAPERS

Food Across Borders:

Production, Consumption, and Boundary Crossing in North America

Recent criticism of our global food system has obscured a longer, and still healthy, tradition of food cultivation and circulation among nations.  Our own national diets are a product of long-existing agricultural empires across the North American continent.  This is especially true in relationship to Mexico: corn, chocolate and peppers are just three of the many indigenous foods that became central to the diets of other nations, including cuisines of the United States.  North of the border, Canada has played a significant role in the cultivation of grain for both nations and is a consumer of many U.S. products.  In terms of U.S. agriculture, without Mexican workers, our national food production system would not function.  These conditions reveal a transnational project, north and south, which have existed for more than a century.  Food Across Borders seeks to examine this world in which boundaries create exclusions and dialogs, coercions and collaborations.  In our examination we hope to uncover both the ways that boundaries represent true divides in terms of rights and power, and also create and reify false categories of “inside” and “outside” that often do not fit the realities of our current food system.

The William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies is joining with Comparative Border Studies at Arizona State University for the 2014-2015 symposia on Food Across Borders.  On behalf of the conference organizers/editors, Matt Garcia, E. Melanie DuPuis, and Don Mitchell, we invite proposals for scholarly papers dealing with food and boundary crossings in North America.  We welcome a range of interpretations, from the movement of people and goods across land and bodies of water to the passage of food over and through our bodily boundaries.  We welcome proposals that explore these issues historically and/or in the contemporary moment.  Possible subjects for exploration include:

• The dependency of the North American food system, from farm to food preparation, on the migration of guest and immigrant labor, and the effects of that dependency on source countries, cities, and villages.
• The ways in which climate change will result in the adaptive migration of agricultural ecosystems and social systems across northern and southern borders, and what that might mean for local, regional, and larger food cultures and practices.
• The public health implications for one nation when it embraces the food consumption and production practices of another.
• The ways in which media represent and reify the boundaries of territory and identity in food discourses.
• The challenges of cross-border food justice organizing in light of the “liberalization” of agricultural trade and the changing geography of agricultural production.

The Food Across Borders symposia will occur in two stages and in two places.  The first will be held on October 3-4, 2014 in Phoenix, Arizona, where there will be a workshop for participants and an opportunity to give initial public presentations of their work.  The second scholars’ workshop and public symposium will be held in Dallas, Texas at SMU in spring 2015.  Each Clements Center symposium follows a similar model and each has resulted in a book or a soon-to-be published book (http://smu.edu/swcenter/Symposia.htm).

We welcome submissions from scholars of any rank—from graduate students to full professors.  Please send a CV and description of an original proposal to Matt Garcia (Matthew.J.Garcia@asu.edu) by September 15, 2013.  The proposal, of up to five pages, should describe the research and explain how it serves the goal of the symposia.  Eight to ten papers will be chosen for the symposia and resulting volume.  For more information see either, http://borders.asu.edu or http://smu.edu/swcenter.