The call for papers for Login. Making Sense of Social Networks, Skepsi‘s fourth annual conference has been extended to 31st March 2011. Click HERE for the full call for papers.
Mar 01
CALL FOR ARTICLES. Feminisms: The Evolution, Volume 4, Issue 1
Feminisms: The Evolution
Let’s get rid of Infirmary Feminism, with its bedlam of bellyachers, anorexics, bulimics, depressives, rape victims, and incest survivors. Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their mouldy neuroses.
Camille Paglia
Today’s perspective on the historical development of feminism gives us a unique opportunity to revisit the question of the needs and requirements to which it responded and thus reassess its current position. The first wave concentrated on women’s equal political and economic rights; the second focused on the differentiation of women’s needs and produced radical feminist movements; the third challenged the concept of feminism itself by concentrating on individual needs in the context of multiculturalism, globalisation and, in more general terms, the condition of post-modernity. We invite papers which discuss the origins, development and evolution of feminism in all its phases, including the current one, from the viewpoint of women’s needs. Do these needs evolve or are they relatively stable and is it rather the recognition of them by society which changes? How do contemporary feminists contribute to our understanding of women’s needs and goals? How do they challenge the universal and homogeneous notion of one ‘feminism’ and encourage the use of the plural ‘feminisms’? We aim to discuss women’s needs as they were addressed in the past and as they are being addressed now. Has, for example, the ‘identity politics’ (which was to target particular personal needs) led to feminism’s being a ‘catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their mouldy neuroses’? Should twenty-first century feminism evolve towards an all-encompassing social agenda and a further politicising of women’s needs or should it be more concerned with art and aesthetics?
We invite contributions from postgraduate students, academic staff and independent scholars. The submitted papers will be peer-reviewed and, if approved, published in the Spring Issue of the online interdisciplinary journal Skepsi.
The length of the article should not exceed 5,000 words. The deadline for articles is 31 March 2011. If you are interested in publishing your research paper in Skepsi, please contact us now at skepsi@kent.ac.uk.
Skepsi is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary online journal based in the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent, UK. Skepsi – which originally meant ‘thought’ in Ancient Greek – symbolises our will to explore new areas and new methods in the traditional fields of academic research in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Previous issues of Skepsi can be found on our website and blog:
http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/journals/skepsi/index.html
Jan 18
Deadline Extended: Creativity and Innovation in Sociology
The deadline for submitting article proposals for the next issue of Skepsi (HERE the call for articles) has been extended to the 15th of February 2011.
Dec 13
Volume 3, Issue 2. Pharmakon: Literature and Violence
The editorial board of Skepsi, and the guest editor of the latest issue, Filippo Menozzi, are proud to announce the publication of Volume 3, Issue 2, Pharmakon: Literature and Violence, which can be downloaded HERE. This issue is also accessible through the DOAJ archive, HERE.
Pharmakon: Literature and Violence will be officially launched this Thursday 16th December at 17.00 in Virginia Woolf Seminar Room 3, University of Kent, on the occasion of the last Centre for Modern European Literature Training Seminar of this Term. All welcome.
Nov 19
CFP: Log In, Making Sense of Social Networks
Log In
Making Sense of Social Networks
Image © Alberto Cominelli
Skepsi’s Fourth Annual Multi-disciplinary Conference
University of Kent
Friday, 27 May 2011
At the threshold of the twenty-first century, people all over the world were getting used to the notion of email, which soon came to replace, almost completely, the more traditional pen and paper. At the same time, the virtual spaces of chat rooms and instant messaging applications were establishing themselves as new means of socialisation. Now a decade has passed and email and IM clients are already becoming obsolete, overcome by the spread of social networks.What has the social network come to replace? What would be the real-life equivalent of a social network? In a matter of seconds, with a single click on Facebook, our bewildered faces can reach not just the other side of the world, as was the case with e-mail, but millions of people, all together, all at the same time. On 26 June 2009, the Iranian authorities blocked the international press from operating openly in Iran. The Iranian people relied on Twitter to narrate their struggle to the outside world. Information no longer simply travels quickly; it instantaneously and effortlessly reaches billions of people.
But these situations are, of course, not enough to encompass the totality of the social network phenomenon: along with the massive circulation of information, something else is filtering into the form of social networking. Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, or MMORPGs, now gather together tens of thousands of people who meet in a virtual environment with their avatars, virtual copies of themselves, not simply to socialise in the strict sense of the term but to create new narratives, build a different world, defeat a lingering evil and abide by new physical and moral rules: all from the safe environment of their own desks.
Although social networks and the Internet have been explored by a variety of disciplines, few in the Humanities have ventured into the virtual world. The international and interdisciplinary conference Log In aspires to make up for this gap, by inviting speakers from all disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences to send their proposals investigating any of the following themes (the list is neither prescriptive nor exhaustive):
- · What new forms of narrative do social networks create? Which narratological instruments are to be used to analyse these new forms of writing (e.g. novels written on Twitter, autobiographies in blogs)? How does interactivity in online gaming impact on the relationship of readers with narrative? Does it influence writers?
- · Do social networks influence the average perception of the old media (such as the written words, photography, cinema, etc.)? How do social networks influence the other media?
- · How does the identity of people change when facing the fragmentation of the multiple online avatars that one can assume? Are people alienating themselves in their online identities? Can this teach us anything about the non-virtual world?
- · What are the new forms of morality and ethics that social networks create? Do they influence the non-virtual world? What is the political impact of social networks?
- · What are the ‘post-human’ implications entailed in the hyper-reality of the virtual world?
- · Photographers without a studio, cinematographers without a producer, journalists with no censorship, authors with no publisher: how do social networks allow us to bypass the conventional social and economic rules?
The theme of the conference is interdisciplinary, so proposals may be submitted for papers in any area of the humanities, such as (the list is neither prescriptive nor exhaustive):
—Continental Philosophy
—Film Studies, Drama and Visual Arts
—Comparative Literary Studies and Literature
—Gender Studies
—Aesthetics
—Analytical Philosophy and Philosophy of Language
—Modern Languages and Linguistics
—Sociology
Abstract proposals (approximately 300 words) should be sent as a Word attachment to the conference organising committee at: login2011@kent.ac.uk.
The email should include the name of the author, institution and brief biographical details. You should also indicate on your proposal any audiovisual requirements you may have. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 28th February 2011.
Speakers will be invited to submit their papers to be considered for publication in the seventh issue (due Winter 2011) of Skepsi, the Interdisciplinary Online Journal of the University of Kent.
ISSN 1758-2679
