Kategorie: Aktuelles

Oct 19-21, 2022, Vienna

Deadline: May 6, 2022

Organizers: Prof. Dr. Teresa Hiergeist (Romanistik); PD Dr. Stefanie Schäfer (Amerikanistik)

In contemporary popular culture, representations of shooting women abound: Super heroines, warrior goddesses, and female avengers brandish their weapons in movies, cartoons, comics and novels, advertisements, and on the shelves of toy stores (Inness 2018, 4); stories of cowgirls, huntresses, and female police officers and soldiers have received increased media attention in the past 30 years (Browder 2008; Browder and Pflaeging 2010; Patton and Schedlock 2012). This new omnipresence of the gun-toting woman in the cultural imaginary indicates her great potential to concentrate different discourses about gender, the legitimacy of violence, and social cohesion. She exposes the values, norms and attitudes of contemporary individuals, groups and societies. In this respect it comes as no surprise that narratives of shooting women negotiate a variety of positions and identities.

Deadline: May 31, 2022

October 20– 22, 2022, Bonn

The last decades have brutally shown that not all lives and bodies are equally grievable. War, increased migratory movements, the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the climate crisis demonstrate that hierarchies of life and death continue to be dominated by colonial and racialized criteria as well as  political and social power structures. In her much-referenced work Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), Judith Butler asserts that  „[s]ome lives are grievable, and others are not; the differential allocation of  grievability […] operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary  conceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a liveable life and a  grievable death?“ (XIV-XV). Her assessment raises further questions about the conception and boundaries of ‘the human’ and who controls them. Since the European Enlightenment the predominant understanding of ‘the human’ has been shaped by a universalizing focus on individualism and rationality. These humanist notions do not only foreground an immaterial understanding of  human essence, neglecting any question of the material existence of the  body, but more so indicate a sharp distinction between subject and object,  self and other. Recent posthumanist scholarship seeks to expose these  binaries and tries to negotiate new understandings of ‘the human’. Examining  marginalised lives and deaths through a focus on black, female, queer, or  non-human agents, critical posthumanism investigates who counts as ‘human’.  This endeavour is especially relevant in a postcolonial context, where existing  ideas of the human mind and body are continuously reconsidered, and the  imagining of alternative ways of life is a central concern. Emerging from this  framework, we hope to explore postcolonial matters of life and death in next  year’s Postcolonial Narrations Forum.  The controlling and policing of life and death, which dominate our screens  again and again in the form of racially motivated police shootings, the  discoveries of mass graves of Indigenous children, and the violence at  Europe’s borders, have long been central to colonialism and its continuous  aftermath. Consequently, the institutionalised regulation of human life and bodies has attracted notice as a major focus in literary and cultural studies,  postcolonial studies, medical and environmental humanities, and other fields.  Concepts such as biopolitics (Foucault), bare life (Agamben), necropolitics (Mbembe), and slow death (Berlant) are only a few among the many tools  which are useful to examine the abovementioned issues. Literary genres as diverse as life-writing, memoir, dystopia, and SF as well as other media have  not only voiced criticism in this regard, but have narrated forms of resistance,  resilience, and survival. These cultural trends reflect political discourses surrounding, for instance, the Black Lives Matter movement, the reclaiming of ​ bodies through mourning rituals, and #RefugeesWelcome. We would like to invite fellow PhD candidates and early career scholars to join us in a multifaceted exchange on postcolonial matters of life and death. We welcome a wide range of contributions on the following and related issues in postcolonial contexts:

9th Triennial Conference of the Central European Association for Canadian Studies

Budapest, Hungary, October 27-29, 2022

New deadline: April 22, 2022

http://kanadistak.hu/2022/02/03/cfp-canadian-landscapes-budapest-hungary-october-27-29-2022/

The Central European Association for Canadian Studies, in cooperation with Eötvös Loránd University, Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Pázmány Péter Catholic University and Budapest Business School University of Applied Sciences, is pleased to announce a conference on “Canadian Landscapes” to be held in Budapest, Hungary, on October 27-29, 2022. The Conference Organizing Committee welcomes papers in English or French on literary, cultural, political, geographical, environmental, historical, artistic, as well as business and economics-related perspectives of the conference theme, including (but not limited to) the following topics:

• cultural landscapes
• indigenous landscapes
• multicultural and transnational landscapes
• climate fiction
• petrol fiction and other resource
• management induced landscapes
• geological landscapes
• ecocriticism
• literary and cultural sustainability
• visual arts
• utopian and dystopian landscapes
• (post)apocalyptic landscapes
• landscapes in translation
• ekphrasis
• landscapes and identity
• landscapes of the mind: psychological
• fiction
• gendered landscapes
• posthuman landscapes
• historical landscapes
• landscapes: theological interpretations
• culinary landscapes
• demographic landscapes
• business landscapes (tourism,
• hospitality, finance, management,
• accountancy, foreign trade, EU-
• Canada relations)
• economic landscapes

The intended program will feature keynote lectures, multiple thematic sessions, panel discussions, sessions for young Canadianists, as well as a teacher-training session and film screening.

Presentations will be 20 minutes, followed by Q&A at the end of each session.

PhD, MA and BA students are also welcome to participate with papers (with the option for BA students to deliver 10-minute presentations). Abstracts of papers (maximum 250 words) and a one-paragraph CV for those planning to deliver papers should be submitted by e-mail to the organizers at karoli.canada@gmail.com and at deak.timea@kre.hu by March 10, 2022 April 22, 2022.

A selection of papers will be published in a special, peer-reviewed journal issue devoted to the theme of the conference.